Being able to handle more dairy cows with the same amount of labor. That was the main objective to purchase Nedap CowControl for dairy farmer Brian Mooney in Kill, County Waterford, Ireland. Here, he runs a spring calving based dairy farm with 220 cows with 250 acres of land. The main reason to invest in monitoring systems was that, since the quotas have been abolished, herd sizes have increased maybe 2 or 3 times as much and he felt like he needed an extra hand.

He felt that Nedap CowControl was the best health monitoring and heat detection system which can be integrated with the drafting system later on down the road. It automatically drafts the cows in heat or the sick cows.

In the past, Brian used tailpaint for heat detection. However, tailpainting was nearly impossible, because he had to go out to the fields and just watch cows. “The cows will pile around you and you expect the cows to move” he said. That was a very hard job without a monitoring system. Now, he uses his phone to look which cows are in heat. “It is very accurate, you can see cows turn up 21 days or whatever after the last time. It’s good, it’s very good” Brian tells enthusiastically.

In the future, Brian would like to move to AI for 100%. He would like to get rid of the stock bulls, because they are dangerous and you need quite a lot of them to inseminate all cows. Another advantage of moving to AI is that he would be able to get a tighter calving pattern.